THE NEW YORKER attention focusses furiously on the reports, the photographs, the film. How good is it? How consistent? How diffi- cult, how dangerous? Could I ride it? The ocean being what it is, no place is perfect. Every wave has its virtues and its flaws, and even at the same spot no two waves are ever exactly the same. No break is good on all tides and winds and swells-not to mention flat spells and storms. Still, great surf spots always arouse the fantasy. What if that magnificent wave keeps breaking just like that for another four hundred yards? What if the next wave is just as good? What if it stays that good, hour after hour, day after day? Surfers are always looking for better waves, and the platonic ideal, the perfect wave, keeps them travelling to the farthest reaches of the globe; it kept me on the ocean roads for years on end. There is a dense and growing lore, a grand arcanum of the world's waves, which complements the localized jargon, the cabalistic code through which surfers trade the secrets of their avocation. Local surf cultures, meanwhile, sprout and flourish near virtually every ridable break on earth. In some places, such as southern Brazil, surfing is a rich boy's sport, taking the social place of polo or the hunt. In most places, it's a multiclass affair, as it was originally, in old Hawaii. I've surfed with yuppie architects and stolid crab fishermen in Ireland, with the sons of campesinos and the sons of oligarchs in Central America. Everywhere, though, one finds the same complicated, passionate at- tention to minute details of local waves, weather, and coastline. Surfers are like farmers or hunters in their rapt ab- sorption in nature's vicinal habits and vagaries. Ask a voluble local about seasonal variations at his home break, and he'll still be diagramming offshore canyons in the dirt an hour later. T HE best-known surf spot in San Francisco is actually not at Ocean Beach but at Fort Point, underneath the Golden Gate Bridge. In "The Surfer's Almanac: An International Surfing Guide" ( 1977), by Gary Fairmont R. Filosa II, Fort Point sounds uninviting. "San Francisco Bay is polluted and infested with roving Navy gunboats equipped to sink surf- ers amid the strong currents, so be cautious," Filosa writes. Although pow- erful currents do run past Fort Point, --- -- ÍfÄ .( . .-/ . . _ I \ -; I Q[, K J/ " I, \ J @ 'J 47 - ......... .:. JfN2 & '9' if "^ "There's nothing here under 'Superman'-is it possible you made the reservation under another name?" . and the rocks there can be dangerous, it is in fact the closest thing to a reliably gentle break in the city. (The deadly gunboats have apparently been retired.) Tourists line the seawall on sunny days, trying to get the bridge in the background of their surfing snapshots. The setting is spectacular, and the novelty of surfing in what is techni- cally not the ocean but a bay increases in the springtime, when, after heavy inland rains, the water is fresh to the taste. The wave itself is undistinguished, though. There are other surf spots, farther out the Golden Gate-notably Dead Man's, a low-tide point break that is experts-only-but the main arena is around the corner to the south, off the windswept desolation of Ocean Beach. A couple of blocks from the south end of Ocean Beach, in the Sunset District, stands Wise Surfboards, a bright, well-managed place, with a long row of shiny new boards along one wan and racks of wetsuits in the back. The shop is a hangout for the Ocean Beach crew, and Bob Wise, a tightly built, sardonic James Brown fan in his early forties, presides over a permanent bull session. It is a sort . of surf-story jukebox, featuring a well- worn collection of tales, most of them essentially slapstick: the time Edwin Salem found himself facing, in waist- deep water, a wave pushing before it the trunk of a redwood tree; the time the resin barrel blew up, burning off Peewee's eyebrows. Business is usu- ally slow, except when rich dope- growers from up north come in loaded with cash and saying to their friends, "You want a board? Lemme buy it for you. You think Bobby might want a board? Let's get him one, too." I used to spend time in Wise's shop, and during the years I lived in San Francisco there was an old photograph taped to the wall behind the counter. It was flyspecked, curling, captionless, and incredibly beautiful. The photo- graph showed a surfer-Peewee, ac- cording to Wise-trimmed very high on a seemingly endless backlighted ten-foot left. The wave was lime green and wind-sculpted, and looked as if it must be somewhere in Bali, but Wise said it was at Outside VFW's, an Ocean Beach sandbar that hadn't bro- ken in years. The wave was so exqui- sitely proportioned that it made the nine-foot-six-inch big-wave "gun" that